


Unfey

by chennieforyourthoughts



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Folk Lore, And other fair folk, Elves, Jongin Sehun and Sicheng are all mentioned, M/M, the wild hunt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:27:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26541400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chennieforyourthoughts/pseuds/chennieforyourthoughts
Summary: Jongdae's decision to invite one of the fair folk inside earns him more than he initially bargained for.
Relationships: Kim Jongdae | Chen/Kim Minseok | Xiumin
Comments: 5
Kudos: 28
Collections: Shall we Chen? Fictional Fest First Round





	Unfey

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt #325: Jongdae is a common human. He has never seen other races before, since his village is so tiny and isolated. When he sees an elf for the first time, he is absolutely mesmerized.
> 
> Thank you to the mods for all of their hard work on this fest—it wouldn't be possible without you! A huge thank you to my prompter as well, and I hope that you enjoy this.
> 
> -
> 
> _Unfey, _adj, Old Norse: Not 'fey' or fated to die.__

Bells echoed against the walls of the valley. They were fae-bells, fairy-bells, and they meant that Jongdae kept his coat tucked firmly around himself and a warm drink between his palms. The sheep were coming down from the plateaus where they grazed for the summer, and their passing through town was marked by the endless ring.

Once, those bells had been made by elves to keep the fae away from the humans’ prized flocks. Now, they were made by humans.

Mist did not swirl away from the trees quickly anymore; it was fall, and the damp clung to Jongdae’s clothes and skin and hair as he walked to the well.

Despite the grey tone of the day, this was not where Jongdae met Minseok. On a warmer day, Minseok swirled into the barn with a cloak twining around his calves and a drenched horse behind him. Ravens croaked in the branches, and Jongdae did not understand them any better than the stranger’s language. But he knew his name because it came to Jongdae unbidden.

Minseok was unfey, Jongdae saw. He carried the eyes of an Other, moss and stone and something not dissimilar to the elder gods. Jongdae had never seen elven eyes before, because most of the eldest of the fair folk had left for cities to become guards of kings long ago.

Jongdae’s village was small, and word of mouth spread quickly. When his neighbors arrived to poke around the edges of his barn, they found the cobblestones already cold where once they had been lit with sparks from the hooves of Minseok’s horse. They asked Jongdae who the stranger was who had come to him during the sheep-driving, but Jongdae could only shrug. “He called himself Xiumin.” That was true, although Jongdae already knew his name.

The village was a waypoint along two annual migrations, and the sheep were the innocuous one. The days grew shorter and the nights longer, and Jongdae sent himself out to chop firewood more and more often. His forge grew cold. Deer began to wander down what constituted a street, and the horses became fresh.

With the last fall winds came the fear. Jongdae let one of his friends stay with him again, and she helped him prepare the pantry and chop the wood as she had always done. Neither knew how much, if any, they would take when they came. Winnie did not fear them.

Come they did. Upon the coldest, darkest dawn of midwinter they descended with their sounding horns and their striking steeds to knock upon the village doors and assemble in the square. Jongdae opened his, for there was little use in resisting.

“Xiumin,” he said.

“Jongdae,” said the hunter, and he stepped inside. He was accompanied by two others this time, and it was light enough that Jongdae could read his features.

Unlike the pair behind him, he was not dead. “Kai. Sehun.”

They ate mortal bread and drank mortal wine, and the fire burned high. They left the curtains torn and the floorboards scared, and Jongdae woke amongst the pieces of what had once been a historical tapestry kept safe in the village.

He sighed and began to gather his home to him once more. Winnie said she had been somewhere she had never been before; she had walked for hours before the villagers found her, although she was unalarmed. Eventually, she went home, and Jongdae found himself wondering how much good he had actually done her. He was handy with a hammer, but she was just as strong, if not more.

The Wild Hunt careened overhead, mercifully far yet too close for comfort. It was the end of midwinter, and Jongdae could not say that this did not relieve him. It did make him curious, however, why one of the members of the hunt was still alive and had come to him early. Maybe he wandered outside of the hunting days and needed a place to stay, or maybe his bond to the hunt required it. Jongdae knew not to ask questions of the fair folk.

Hooves rang like dissonant bells in Jongdae’s courtyard, but nobody was there when he opened his door. The day was grey, and a figurine of elk antler rested atop a small pile of gold. Jongdae scooped it up and set the carven raven on his table, near the fire. He fed the village, and if the villagers feared the fairy gold, they did not say so in front of him.

So came the sheep, and the trials of winter faded as the bells slipped from ringing in the minds of all. Life was back to usual in Jongdae’s village, and the only things out of place were the missing tapestry and the added raven.

Ravens had taken to roosting above his roof, too, but they bothered Jongdae little. They were not aggressive, and he found himself distinguishing between their many voices. They were loud, but their silence spoke volumes.

Minseok returned with a raven upon his shoulder. It shifted in the draft from Jongdae opening the door, and stared at him with beady eyes. Before Jongdae could protest, Minseok had lifted it and put it upon the smith’s shoulder. He lightened once it was gone from his own shoulder.

“Carak will keep you unbound.” Jongdae startled, and the raven’s grip tightened to the point of pain.

“Please, come in. I have food and wine.” Minseok followed him in and accepted both.

When he had eaten, Minseok pulled metal from under his cloak. It was dull, and he handed it to Jongdae. “You are a smith?”

Jongdae nodded.

“I will pay you to work the iron to bind fae.” He should not have accepted, but he did, and Minseok did not lie. It was iron to bind fae.

There was a saying in the countryside about the mesmerizing glamor of elves, and it went like this: twice burned, thrice returned. Jongdae had never understood why anyone would return if they had been burned, and he still did not, although he saw the temptation.

Minseok left the crown with him, the dulled crown of a long dead king, to keep until midsummer. Carak stayed, and he hunched over it day and night. It took Jongdae time to understand what he had to do, but eventually he realized he had been staring straight at it.

♛ ♛ ♛

The raven took to wing in the spring and brought trinkets to Jongdae. He did not touch the crown, but he carried iron with him from every flight. Jongdae gave Carak eggs whenever he could spare them until the bird deigned to have his feathers stroked lightly. It was simpler than preening, and he had always been a particularly lazy raven. He croaked at Jongdae with every delivery and followed him to the forge, where he perched just overhead of the intense heat and flames licking around the metal.

“Cold,” he said, and Jongdae fumbled his tongs. “Cold hunt. Hunt cold.” And then he was silent, pecking around his grip on the wood. The iron was warm in the heat of summer, even though it was not on the forge, so Jongdae thought about it instead of the strange creature. It was familiar to him, and the tongues it spoke when he heated and worked and cooled in turn were soothing compared to Minseok’s bird.

Iron hissed as it cooled, and the raven hissed back at it. Jongdae smiled and showed Carak how he was using the pieces given to him. He avoided working the fairy gold, even though it still shone brightly in the corner of his home. Some sort of intuition told him to keep it as far from his forge as he could—only the elven smiths used their gold, and they tended to embody trouble. Jongdae had never met one, and he was unsure whether he ever wanted to, no matter the beauty of their creations.

His own creation was distinctly human in design. It was a set of overlapping bands, loose around the wrist and just barely heavy enough to provide a grounding amount of weight on the arm. Carak watched him curiously when he returned to the bands after some days, melting platinum to coat them. The bird’s approving clicks told Jongdae he had done well to disguise the binding iron.

The iron-platinum was no longer a crown, but Jongdae doubted that Minseok would wear one. He had held the iron without pain, but he was unfey and elven unlike his peers. He was not dead, but Jongdae had heard stories that the fey who lead them was also still living. Sometimes Jongdae wondered whether the bands would burn Minseok after longer exposure, but always reasoned that they were not made for him.

The elf returned to Jongdae’s village not long after midsummer, and Jongdae was surprised that he was somewhat late. The bands glittered when Minseok raised them up towards his eyes to inspect them. “Thank you,” he said, and the smith was so taken aback that he lost his words.

Once Minseok and Carak had left again, the village realized relatively quickly. Most had never seen an elf, and those who had seen one had been lucky—or unlucky. It depended upon the day. But Jongdae had seen an elf, seen him again, and seen him a third time: twice burned, thrice returned. He was relieved because that meant he was now free, but his own hushed forge spooked him. There was no raven there to peck and scuffle or speak to him, and no iron sat ominously out back, waiting to be worked.

He was alone for several years. Against his best judgement, he went outside during the peak of midwinter to watch the Wild Hunt careen across the sky. Their steeds’ legs moved across the edges of white-blue, barely distinguishable from the relatively dark midday. The Sun hardly rose where Jongdae was in midwinter, although it did appear for a scant few hours of precious daylight. The Hunt’s horses and hounds processed slowly, a mob supposedly chasing their own raving souls. Jongdae raised an eyebrow at the local knowledge—Minseok, although somewhat odd, had not seemed to be raving. The host was too far away for Jongdae to distinguish Minseok’s steed from the others, but that mattered little; Jongdae knew he was a lost cause, and he didn’t need any saying about twice and thrice to scold him.

The fairy gold was running low when Jongdae heard the knock on his door. He did not need to see who was outside to know that it was Minseok, but it was a relief to see the elf and his Other eyes. Carak clung unsteadily to his shoulder once more, and flapped over to Jongdae, apparently pleased. Minseok shone in the longer daylight, resplendent with his white hair melting to gold; Jongdae took a deep breath when he extended his hand.

“Your payment,” Minseok announced, stepping aside once Jongdae had taken his hand. Behind him stood two elven steeds, Minseok’s usual black and another rippling golden and ebony. “Care to go on a hunt?”

Jongdae openly gawked at the horses standing on his cobblestones. “Yes, please.” It rang hollow in his ears, but Minseok lifted him into the saddle with ease.

Minseok shut Jongdae’s door for him and stepped up onto his own horse, and Carak lifted to flutter overhead. It was a terrible idea to follow Minseok into the woods, and Jongdae knew this. When Minseok nudged his horse away from the house, sparks dancing beneath its shoes, Jongdae hesitated. His horse stopped when he lifted the reins, and Minseok twisted to look back. The elf’s horse wore no tack, while Jongdae’s horse shifted uncomfortably under hers. "Never gone away before?" Minseok smiled then, benign enough to make Jongdae take note. “It’s alright little one, there are more chances.”

Jongdae blinked; he had not been expecting to understand so many words from the elf, and certainly not in a row. A couple of complete sentences was a shock. "Never," he admitted, "I've never had a reason to."

His horse made the decision for him. She walked forward, the black tips of her ears dipping into the shadows of the treeline before the rest of her golden body. "Well, consider this your payment."

They meandered along, Minseok's path winding back and forth as his mount got irritated with their lack of speed. "Ran out of gold?"

The elf shook his head. "No. Getting some now." Miseok squeezed with his legs and his horse broke into a trot, then a canter as Jongdae's horse began to follow. It was smoother than Jongdae had expected, having only ridden stocky local working ponies in the past, and they crossed the terrain with ease.

The Sun still beamed down on them at breaks in the trees, Jongdae's hands warming where they gripped the reins. The buckle on the leather was beautiful, fairy gold like his horse and sturdy when he traced the edges with his thumbs. The woods thundered by Jongdae, and he wondered to think that he had nothing but the horse and the clothes on his back and the almost-stranger riding ahead of him.

But Minseok guided him to another town, a bigger one on the mountain facing a city, and cleared a path through the streets for him. Jongdae jumped down only when he did, standing before a small lodge just outside the town's limits. A fire was already burning inside, and their horses cropped the tender spring shoots sprouting at the back. Minseok was quiet when he invited Jongdae through the rooms of his home, and Jongdae found that it was somewhat familiar—on the back wall hung his village's tapestry. In the semi-darkness of the closing door, Carak shot straight through the rooms and to the side of the lodge, leaving Minseok chasing him with Jongdae scrambling after.

"Here we are!" Minseok practically sang with pride, pulling open another heavy door to let Jongdae through. Below the raven sat all the trappings of Jongdae's work, but they were not his; the anvil carried different scratches, and hung on the black wall were sheets of mail. Jongdae hovered over the unworked metal, and was little surprised to find the rest of Minseok's hoard of fairy gold.

When they lit the fires, the room became the living sparks flying from the elven-horse's metal shoes. It flickered in strange elongations, sinuous around Minseok's arms as the elf worked and Jongdae watched. What he coaxed into existence were bracelets of the same form as the ones that had freed Minseok, and Jongdae took his reverently when it was cool.

It was foolish to take a work of fairy gold from a smith, but Jongdae no longer listened. That winter, the annual revelry passed them by, and Jongdae pulled the blankets up higher around them and listened instead to the fairy-bells chiming in the night. _Twice burned, thrice returned,_ he thought, _for the unfey to be free._


End file.
